HOLTBY: Anderby Wold, 1923

Looking south from Rudston churchyard. 

Both valley and hills are ploughed and planted.  Plantation woods dominate the skyline to provide shelter for game birds and windbreaks for farms.

This landscape is not Romantic or picturesque; instead it is productive and intensively farmed.   The economics of the North Wolds determines the fates of everyone in the book and focuses David Rossiter's question: who should benefit from such wealth?  The Virago Modern Classics 1984 edition of Anderby Wold missed the point by using J. McIntosh Patrick's  Lake District Picture Summer in Eskdale for the cover...

Ironically the chapter called 'The Fruitful Ground' shows this territory as ripe for political agitation.   Simultaneously the fertility of Anderby Wold  points out the infertile, childless, sexless marriage in which Mary is trapped.   Anderby is a small place, policed by gossip, fruitful in rumours, inhabited by many who are jealous of Mary, either personally or politically and are glad to watch her fall.  

Despite her pretensions to queenship, Mary is no more than a well-off landowner, whilst the Darcy of Anderby Wold is Sir Charles Seton, who seems based on Sir  Mark Sykes of Sledmere, a village and stately home ten miles east of Rudston.  

Sledmere

Sir Mark Sykes was part of the Sykes family based in the house and estate of Sledmere, a family with an ambitious history of building.    One of his forebears, Sir Tatton Sykes,  is commemorated by the Sir Tatton Sykes monument of 1857  that stands beyond the Capabilty Brown landscape of Sledmere House on a ridge of the Wolds. The name 'Tatton' is taken from the Tatton family that married into the Sykes family. 

The Tatton Sykes Monument.

It stands beside the B1252 like a stone rocket, awaiting launch.  It is visible for miles from the south. 

The Tatton Sykes Monument depicts Sir Tatton Sykes as he wanted to be remembered by posterity: ‘loved him as a friend and honoured him as a landlord’ as the inscription that circles the monument states.  It shows him as a countryman and horseman, no doubt a hunter, a figure reminiscent of Carne in South Riding but neither Carne’s house, nor estate, is a match for Sledmere.

         Sir Tatton Sykes, Baronet, as mounted gentleman                                    At each corner of the monument is a monogram of his initials.

The view to the south.  In the foreground is the weed-choked moat  beyond are agricultural fields; the blue haze on the horizon is the

hinterland of Beverley, Hull and the River Humber.                               

Anderby Wold anticipates South Riding in showing the end of feudal hierarchy or at least end of the dominance of the 'gentlemen-farmers', if not of the aristocracy.  As far as Sledmere is concerned, the aristocratic world of 1913 has not entirely vanished.  The dedication of this recent bench echoes the words of the Tatton Sykes monument, though it depicts dogs, not horses as the animal of status:  

Dedication bench

'In Memory of Sir Richard Sykes baronet 1905-1978

A good and generous Landlord Erected by Tenants and Staff

of the Sledmere Estate'

Anderby Wold  does not mention the grandeur of the estate of Sledmere and the stately home at the heart of it, but the link between the fictional Sir Peter and the actual Sir Mark is that both hold wagon competitions.  Chapter XIII depicts 'Waggon Day' in June when both wagons and horses are decorated.  The chapter is called 'The Shadow on the Wheat'.  In the context of the story, set in 1912, this refers to the looming labour difficulties and the pending strike.  Looked at from the perspective of 1923,  Holtby would be aware that Sykes’ organisation of wagoners was undertaken with the possibility of a war in mind; the wagons that are seen gaily decorated in Chapter  XIII of Anderby Wold would have seen service in France two years later.  Anderby Wold spells 'waggoners' and 'waggon' in the older style with two 'g's; South Riding uses the more modern form 'wagon'.   

The Sykes family commemorated their men's  exploits in France with the Wagoner’s Memorial.   This employs a cartoon style to show Germans burning churches and attacking women in Belgium before being driven off by gallant Yorkshiremen.

The caption below this carving says: "This was the course of the  annual competition. 'The Sun' [? the inscription is worn],  Fimber Fields". 

Fimber is a village 5 miles south west of Sledmere on the B1251.   

Evidently part of 'Wagon Day' was a competitive circuit of a course marked out in a field, designed to train the wagoners in moving army supplies fast over challenging landscapes.   Anderby Wold  does not show this but South Riding depicts a wagon event as one of the highlights of the Flintonbridge Agricultural Show: 'the wagoners driving at a hand [hard?] gallop down the track and between the stakes that left only an inch or two on each side of the thundering wheels.  It was impossible not to catch one's breath as they swept rattling past the stand.' (South Riding, p293).  Something similar must have taken place in Fimber Fields.    

The largest agricultural show in the East Riding is the Driffield Show, that has been going on since the 1850s.   This would seem to make 'Flintonbridge' into Driffield, though it is not sited where Driffield is on Holtby's preliminary sketch map of South Riding.  

                                                                           Returning to the wagoners of the monument:

                      The need for them to go is evident,                                                           These photos show how the narrative

                   the Germans are committing atrocities,                                                    is arranged.  Top = pre-war, middle = transition

                   burning churches and killing women in                                                     bottom = war.  In the bottom picture one brave

                      Belgium and France, (bottom panel).                                                    Yorkshireman holds off a mob of Germans, one

                                                                                                                               of whom is armed with a saw-edged bayonet, whilst 

                                                                                                                              wagoners unload a wagon, packed with war supplies.

                                                                                                                               Though the sky is filled with shells, they work as 

                                                                                                                               calmly as they did loading wheat in the earlier scene. 

Immediately after the war and again in the 1950s-60s there was a cultural inclination to treat accounts of German atrocities in Belgium and France as incidents invented or exaggerated by propaganda.  In recent years historians have reexamined the use of force against civilians by the German army during WWI and seen this as a calculated tactic to intimidate populations in the hope of holding down conquered territory and deterring resistance.  (See Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First world War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007).  

As part of this policy elements of the German battle fleet attacked the Yorkshire coast on December 15-16 1914 (http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/raid_yorkshire_coast_1914.html).  

Winifred Holtby was in Scarborough when Scarborough was shelled during this raid; she incorporated the raid in her 1924 novel The Crowded Street. 

When the novelist Edith Wharton wrote her reports of the French front line in Fighting France From Dunkerque to Belport (1914-15), she did not report hearsay accounts of atrocities against civilians but interviewed survivors of the destruction of Gerbervilller herself (Republished reprint 2013, p48-52).  

As far as the memorial is concerned, all ends happily as a German flees a Tommy in a scene captioned 'Marne':

Nothing about this monument reminds the viewer that the Battle of the Marne was the start, not the finish of a war that would grind on until 1918, by which time even the smallest Wolds villages had sent and lost men in the war.    Anderby Wold expects all its readers to know that that this is the fate awaiting the world of fiction and fact in 1912. 

The central romance of Anderby Wold anticipates South Riding; sexual attraction between political opposites.  A more polemic or optimistic book might have allowed Mary to elope with David Rossiter, instead the book points out the disjunction between feminism and socialism.   Extra wages for rural labourers will not address the sensual poverty of the lives led by Mary and many other women in the book.  A more just distribution of income will not liberate women from the prison of reputation.   The book deploys irony rather than propaganda.  Though the economic system is entirely patriarchal, the social system is matriarchal; both John Robson and Tom Robinson are passive figures, dominated by their wives.  John is not a tyrant or an oppressor; he is an amiable, well-meaning man, whose worse faults are being dull and unromantic.